Read to your baby as early as you can, scientists say. If you have a baby, drop everything and go read to him now. It will help “immunize” him “against illiteracy.” Whether some texts are better vaccinations than others remains to be seen.

The latest installment of Henri Cole’s Paris diary: “This morning I observed a beautiful, sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep. Deer make a bed out of unmowed grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleep alone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any sense of time or place. Often I fly.”

Seamus Heaney, the man, the poet, the app: “Too often arts organizations and publishers resort to stunts and gimmicks to add some glitz to poetry, and issue terrible statements about how they want to make it ‘relevant’ and ‘trendy.’ If a poem needs digital bells and whistles to become relevant, it’s obvious it wasn’t very good in the first place … this app adds context and insight to the tales without compromising or clouding them with too much technical faff.”

Today the composer Christopher Tignor releases a new record, Thunder Lay Down in the Heart, whose title track is a twenty-minute work for string orchestra, electronics, and drums. The composition is named after a line from John Ashbery’s 1956 poem, “A Boy,” and it begins with a haunting new recording of Ashbery reading the poem in his Chelsea apartment, which Tignor has graciously allowed us to feature here.

Tignor says:

“A Boy” rang out to me while I was writing “Thunder Lay Down in the Heart.” My song titles usually come in response to the music, and I often find myself looking through books of poetry to turn my mind on in that way. When I was a student at Bard, I studied poetry with Ashbery—he was my advisor—and when I read this poem, I responded right away to the conflict between the protagonist and the visceral narrative tension of the storm: the sound, like thunder, of falling “from shelf to shelf of someone’s rage,” the rain at night against the box cars, the inevitable flood.

It’s precisely that kind of unfolding I hoped to embody in my musical work, with its own flooded lines, dry fields of lightning, and cabbage roses. A reviewer recently described the work as its own “vast electrical disturbance.” Hard to disagree.